[mapserver-dev] Building external projects with libmapserver

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

Hi all,

On 09/26/2013 04:23 PM, Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
> Thomas,
> 
> Would it make sense to create a public C-API based on the SWIG interface
> that remains relatively stable and is already documented so the
> incremental effort would be minimal. If this happened, then libmapserver
> would be free to change as needed and third party developers would have
> a stable C-API to work with.

>From what I've seen in mapserver-api.{c,h} this should become the new
public API. Installing the .h in the includes directory is currently
disabled in CMakeLists.txt.

> 
> Just a thought.
> 
> -Steve
> 
> On 9/26/2013 6:29 AM, thomas bonfort wrote:
>> Bas,
>> The higher level issue we have is that we do not publish a public API,
>> and therefore there should be no 3rd party applications having the
>> need to link or compile against us. That said, we could rather easily
>> bring back the mapserver-config script by having it generated by cmake
>> (very closely to the patches you've applied for debian). For 7.0 I
>> would like to publish such an API that would be sufficient for
>> mapcache, other interested projects can chime in and help if they need
>> further functionality exposed.

If the mapserver-api files are indeed the new public API in question,
this looks very promising. Very much like the mapscript API.

In the mean time there are projects that already include mapserver
support via mapserver.h. Unless you explicitly want to discourage these
practices, I think it's a good idea to provide something like
mapserver-config for 6.4.

The mapserver-config can also be used by the mapserver cmake module
instead of probing the filesystem.

>>
>> regards,
>> thomas

Kind Regards,

Bas

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